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The obvious professionalism and finish of this show suggests a very conscious move away from the now rather hackneyed romantic ideal of the artist as peripheral, marginalized dissident. Cool but not cold, critical, but not clinical, all the works purvey an absence rather than a presence. From the ironical use of spiritualism, as a symbol of the way society hides its callous interiors behind a mask of myth and "mystery", to the detached objectivity of the conceptual and computer pieces, there is an overriding sense of the artist as removed.
This carefully observed phenomenon establishes a self-critical, self-reflexive framework for the show in which curator, Graham CoulterSmith, succeeds in confirming his notion that there is much quality art in Brisbane which is not expressionistic.
The sense of total objectivity is most evident in the beautifully intricate computer generated images, created by a computer after the artist, Adam Welter, has entered a mathematical formula. In contrast, Jeanelle Hurst displays a potpourri video collage. A jumble of video images and computer generated text act as a conscious disruption of the ordered plasticity of this essentially masculine dominated technology.
Scott Redford shows no mercy in his distrust of the notion of the artist as creative genius with his Warholesque non-participation in the production of of his works. Mark Webb, on the other hand, employs a paradoxically tidy minimalist approach to his anti-art (history) installation. An art history book, waste paper bin and broom serve to illustrate that the primary function of art history is simply to tidy up.
References to art history appear again in the work of Alien Furlong. Highly seductive pencil drawings of The Blessed Saint Ludivica Albertoni in ecstasy and